Session 4 Objective: Write Summative Performance Task and Formative Performance Task components for each IDM. Create Taking Informed Action component for each IDM.
5. The purpose of assessment is for learning. One of the biggest challenges teachers face is understanding what students know. Assessments come in a variety of forms, but none is perfect and each has constraints as a vehicle for judging students’ knowledge and skills. The IDM features both formative and summative performance tasks, and these provide assessments for instructional purposes and evaluation. The formative performance tasks reflect an inquiry’s supporting questions and offer students opportunities to build their content knowledge and their social studies skills. Formative performance tasks also offer teachers snapshots of their students’ progress so that they can modify their instructional plans if necessary. The summative performance task is tied to an inquiry’s compelling question and asks students to construct an evidence-based argument in response.
The formative and summative performance tasks threaded throughout the inquiries provide teachers with multiple opportunities to evaluate what students know and are able to do. These tasks can be informal formal, but each is constructed to provide students with an opportunity to learn by doing and for teachers to have a steady loop of data to inform their instructional decision making.
As a result, the IDM encourages the use of a variety of assessment approaches for formative performance tasks—writing, debates, T-charts, and structured discussions. The summative performance task may also take a number of forms—a five-paragraph essay, a chart, or a poster. The form in which an argument is expressed is less important than the opportunity it provides for teachers to see how their students marshal evidence to express and support their conclusions.
The summative performance tasks act as a kind of convergent assessment. A convergent assessment is one where the preceding, formative performance tasks have been scaffolded in such a way that students’ knowledge and skills converge in the construction of evidence-based arguments that respond to compelling questions.
Convergent assessments are useful as direct measures of students’ capacity to engage with an inquiry. Also useful, however, are divergent assessments as they provide opportunities for teachers to stretch their students’ understandings. Each summative performance task features an extension task. These tasks can take many forms—a structured discussion, a perspective-taking exercise, or a documentary. The idea is to present students with additional and alternative ways to engage with the ideas that are central to an inquiry.
Extensions, along with the Taking Informed Action activities described later, offer variety to the inquiry assessments. Although inquiries may end formally when students’ construct their arguments, teachers may want to vary the ways in which students present those arguments by substituting the options represented in the extensions or the taking Informed Action activities.
6. Disciplinary sources are the building blocks of inquiry. The Internet is a useful resource for social studies teachers to find primary and secondary sources. Access to original writings, maps, political cartoons, artwork, and the like present terrific opportunities for students to deeply explore the content behind a compelling question. Sources can take a variety of forms—including text, data, spatial representations, images, artifacts—and can even be embodied in people’s stories.
Not all sources are equally valuable or reliable, however. Students will need the guidance of their teachers as they learn to navigate the sources represented in the inquiries. First, teachers need to help their students realize that every source reflects a perspective; implicitly and/or explicitly, all sources reflect the bias of their producers. Historian E. H. Carr (1961) recognized this condition when he cautioned, “study the historian before you study the facts” (p. 26). Given Carr’s caution, the second way in which teachers can assist their students is to use a range of sources as they develop their instructional plans. Finally, teachers need to think about the forms in which they present sources to their students. Although there is considerable value in reading sources in their original length and language, teachers should consider the possible advantages of annotating, excerpting, and/or modifying sources, especially long and conceptually dense texts. The IDM embraces the use of multiple sources. Because there are far more sources on every topic than could be listed in the inquiries and because no one source can address every aspect and perspective on a given topic, the inquiries contain a limited number of featured sources. These featured selections illustrate the kinds of sources students might use to build their knowledge, skills, and arguments. Sources can be used for three distinct, but mutually reinforcing, purposes: to generate students’ curiosity and interest in the topic, to build students’ content knowledge, and to help students construct and support their arguments related to a compelling question. Recognizing the rich array of sources available, the writers have included additional source suggestions for teachers to consider as they build out the inquiries.